With what specs, and what’s the performance like? I might just give Zoom another try. And yes, I have fixed the video playback problem in the browser but not mpv. I think I’ll just change mpv’s default settings. . .
On my T430 using a debian-minimal based template running Brave. Just for the meeting 1GB of memory is enough, but you’ll get better results with 1.5GB or even 2GB just in case you need to open another tab or two during the meeting but in the same qube. All the other Qubes are pretty much idle. Obviously I don’t run backups or compile projects while in meetings, so at most there is some cycles in the signal or mail qubes being consumed.
The qube is a HVM with a dedicated USB controller and the Blue Yeti USB Microphone and Logitech for Creators StreamCam Premium are directly connected to it. I found that the quality of the video and audio is mostly impacted by the source, so I spend a little money there. Most meetings I just let run over my Starlink connection which is fine but introduces a little bit of lag/delay. When this becomes an issue I switch to Verizon LTE for the duration of the meeting.
In my personal experience the browser makes a huge difference. Firefox is just a dumpster fire at this point and Mozilla is obviously busy doing other things than taking care of their core product !?!? I digress. Brave seems to be most efficient in a low resource scenario (my impression). When it comes to performance I personally also get subjectively better results on debian-minimal, but that might be because that’s where I spent most time learning and tweaking.
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Thanks, I tried out Brave with some sites that were laggy on Firefox and it’s much smoother. I don’t think I’ll buy extra equipment for video meetings though, so now that’s my biggest problem. I can accept pretty much everything else about Qubes if I don’t try to troubleshoot and optimize that much.
If I had more of my work synced through a cloud service or used a self-hosted solution, then in theory, it wouldn’t be that bad to shut down Qubes, and just run Linux off an internal SSD with a USB adapter for meetings. Cryptomator could be a good choice, but I never got it to work. Does anyone have suggestions about this or alternative approaches to zoom meetings? I do have a tablet, but I wouldn’t be able to screen share important things, it’s too uncomfortable, and I look unprepared for the meeting as if I’m on my phone.
Related: QubesOS freeze, crash and reboots - #219 by tanky0u
+1 to that.
Interesting. Brave, however, also bloats its browser with crypto-wallet related addons (that nobody askes, honestly).
Have you tried Librewolf.net as a “less-bloated” firefox alternative? I wonder how it stands against Brave from the resource consumption standpoint.
I did use librewolf for some time but it made no noticeable difference performance wise for media consumption and other video related tasks. Brave performes much better.
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I have had the same experience, it doesn’t matter if you use Librewolf. The problem is in the Firefox core, as fare as I know forks like Librewolfs use the same codebase. Chromium just seems to have the best performance/optimization when it comes to JavaScript, video rendering, etc.
This is not a problem unique to Qubes OS, it is the same for traditional Linux, but with the resource limitation of the appVMs the issue becomes a lot more noticeable.
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Well there is ungoogled chromium… That has less obvious bloat! Anything with chrome or Google in the title makes my privacy feathers ruffle, but Brave uses the same base so whats the difference in practice?
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In my experience Linux never runs as well on laptops as Windows does. There’s always some stupid little hardware kink you gotta work out… Either the sound’s garbage, or you have no fan/noise control, or you can’t restore from hibernate… And yes I know Qubes “isn’t Linux” but I’d expect the same sorts of issues.
On a desktop though… 
best thing since sliced bread
What’s your use case?
I just need my Qubes pc for the vault qube to store my passwords where microsoft and the gubbyment can’t see them rofl. I wanted to use it as a router too (for network tunneling & chaining, which qubes EXCELLS at) but nooooooooo, apparently nobody knows how to friggin iptables with this damn thing… hint hint User Support
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For an operating system that’s this advanced, it seems like a good deal for a free product. I haven’t gave a dime and I get the collective knowledge of this forum so I can at least get the basics up and running. The people with real knowledge don’t hang out here, this is mostly just a place for us users.
Where do the wizards hang out then…? Please don’t say reddit